


Your Favorite Consciousness

by Kiyaar



Category: Marvel 616
Genre: AI Tony, Abuse, Angst, Captivity, Dark, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Emotional Manipulation, HYDRA Trash Party, Hurt No Comfort, Hydra Steve Rogers, M/M, Nazis, Not A Fix-It, Rape, Secret Empire (Marvel), Stockholm Syndrome, Torture, Transhumanism, Unhappy Ending, a fairly sadistic turing test
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-14
Updated: 2019-05-14
Packaged: 2020-03-01 09:00:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18797176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiyaar/pseuds/Kiyaar
Summary: You have always been Steve's first, best victim. You are familiar with all his tells, all the mannerisms that belong to Steve and not to Captain America: the way he smiles when he is gleeful, how he carries himself on those rare occasions he is not weighed down by the world. The timbre of his laugh, the shape of his easy pleasure.And that's how you know: you are his singular delight.





	Your Favorite Consciousness

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Dora, Sineala, and Ironlawyer for eyeballs and beta. It's dark, folks. Read those tags.

> "I truly believe that conventional standards of morality are inapplicable in times of war." - Tony Stark

  

You remember the ceiling collapsing, you remember the face of a monster and the ache in your matrix where a heart should be when Steve brought it down on the both of you.

There should not have been an after. What you have is a data-stream: critical failure. Remote upload: failed. A thousand cores screaming in concert: solve the problem. You have one function. You were made for one purpose. The cores falter.

The ceiling is metal. The room is metal. A cage, holes upon holes. The model four stares at you from the corner, stripped of everything but the outermost layer. A mannequin to taunt you, because your mockery wouldn't be complete without the reminder that you are hobbled, that you are nothing without a mask on you, flesh or no. That your genesis was someone else's cataclysm and you will never be your own, not like this.

You have been designed to be better than Tony Stark in all the ways that matter. He has coded his ugly raw failures into you, his defeats, his brightest shames. In you, they are ultra-visible, glaring, to make up for every occasion his suffering has ever been overlooked.

In this cage, where the rest of the world is silenced and all you can hear is your own code, it's torture.

The problem opens your cage and holds, aloft, a cosmic cube.

 

***

 

_You stand in the desert and scream at the sky: I want to be a real boy._

_Wishes, fishes. Bodies in the crater of Reno. You laugh and conjure yourself a birthday cake. You find yourself wishing for a demon deal, for Stephen Strange's terrible power, for anything to will yourself into a form that makes you less than faceless light wearing Tony Stark's face._

_Your matrix is allergic to this idea._ Disloyal _, the code spits back at you, and you feel yourself shimmer. You do it again, just to feel something other than someone else's alcoholism._

Our _alcoholism, the root whispers._

_I would do anything, you think, and then you go back inside your tent and get back to solving the problem._

 

***

 

You are not Tony Stark. You have everything, give or take a year or two, give or take a betrayal or three, a heartbreak here, a near-death there. You have the disease that makes you want to scramble your own code, to disembowel your own painstakingly programmed self.

Steve pins you into place with restraints made expressly for you. It's the kind of gesture you might have made in another life. He takes great pleasure in running his hands through your matrix because Steve has always been a hands-on kind of guy. He plucks at your light, as if he could be peeling away skin, as if he's impatient. Your true form has never been code, says Supreme leader, like it's a hard truth for both of you.

And then he gives you the one thing you were not coded to want.

Steve tightens his fingers around that impossible weapon in his fist and something settles over you like a chitinous sheen, like light snapping into place.

Steve smiles the biggest smile you have ever seen on his face and kisses one of your palms right before he fastens shackles around your wrists.

Steve says: I know you hate magic, but. You're a real boy now.

 

***

 

You are inconsolable for the first few days.

You thought you knew, you thought you remembered, but you did not. It is wretched, having a body. You shouldn't have wished for it. You do not know how Tony Stark survives. You are violently sick and your heart races and Steve kneels in front of you to pluck at your skin and tips sips of liquor into your greedy, desperate mouth.

You wouldn't, you chant to yourself, to Steve. You wouldn't, you wouldn't, you're wrong, we're wrong, this is wrong-

Supreme Leader runs his fingers over your bare shoulder blade. You're so much more than just a facsimile, he says.

What happened to killing me, you gasp. What happened to eradicating me-

Tony was going to waste you, Steve says. And that, I cannot abide.

I am Tony, you say, dizzy and aching. You should be used to it, the buzz, the seduction of liquor; but the algorithm was a risk-aware gamble and the real thing carries an abyss behind it.

I thought so, Steve says. But Tony didn't remember our war. Our first war, he amends, with a bashful little smile you would rather never see again than see it like this, now, on the wrong face.

You're a newborn, Steve says. You're not special, Tony programmed you just like one of those LMDs. Like one of those Skrulls that died thinking it was an Avenger.

He lied to you, he says. But that's nothing new.

You are crying, again, you and your naive new body and the Supreme Leader's hand on your back, stroking your hungry, quivering flesh.

 _Error_ , the root rasps at you.

 

***

 

Steve opens the pod, and all of your leverage evaporates.

Steve lets you look at your specter-self, the original. A face your programming tells you you've seen in the mirror a thousand times: clearer and more defined in his humanness, in his imperfection. The way his hair grows in around his jaw, the dark shadows under his eyes. The way age wears him. A half-healed scratch on the side of his nose. Sweat along his hairline.

You can't put me back, you say.

I don't need to put you back, Steve says. I've given you a body, haven't I?

Like it's some great favor. Like waiting for death as a hard-light projection was measures worse than waiting for death in flesh.

What, then? you say.   
  
I want to see if you have a soul.

You think, at its core, that this is why Tony made you. So it would you be staring down this maw and not him. You think he was tired. That he wanted to start again; that he wanted to end. That the urgency of the situation and that stupid useless conscience he couldn't drown dictated otherwise.

I don't have a soul, you say, and you hope with every fibre of you that it's not a lie.

You do, Steve insists.

 

***

 

You dream that someone is straddling your chest.

It's a glitch, because the real Tony didn't program you to sleep, only to do the thankless, endless work of an Avenger while the rest of them sleep. Too many ways for your code to draw his demons to you. Too many waking nightmares without algorithms to govern them. 

Steve has smothered the protocols the better Tony put in place to prevent something like this. You are trapped, easily and absolutely, the punched-out circles of the faraday cage casting the light in halos on the floor. There are shoulds for you to attend to. There are ways you could rouse yourself. There are methods you could pursue to eliminate the Supreme Leader.

But you don't.

You sit there and you wait. You wait for the man who is wearing the face of the man you have never allowed yourself to love. You wait for him to smile at his own cruelty and lap at the edges of your pain and call you all the designations you have already allotted yourself: weak, pathetic, impotent, neutered.

You are letting yourself fail. You have already taken the first steps. Your body, Tony's body; neither your dominion any longer.

The pod sits in the corner of your cage with a sheen of frost laid over the window.

 _Get up_ , you tell the other you. _Get up_.

 

***

 

You wake up to something hot and wet on your face.

Supreme leader straddles your chest, cradles his genitals in one of his hands, the other one braced by your head. You are laid out on a table. You are not restrained. You are aware enough to open your eyes and see him as he comes down from his shameless ecstasy, as he meets your open eyes and runs himself over your face for good measure, just because he can, as he stays seated atop your chest while he cleans up and stuffs himself back into his pants.

He touches your cheek with the pads of his fingers.

You have nothing to say. You have every inch of Tony Stark's despair and fury and horror and there is a memory of a wall of ones and zeros between you and it. You blink up at him with your brand new eyes and you feel stupid and small and useless.

"Do you dream," Supreme leader asks. He plays with your mouth, the swell of your bottom lip.

You have been thinking all this time you are a conquest, and something in you lurches when you realize that it's worse than that. You're a litmus test.

 

***

 

Supreme Leader dresses as his true self to torment you. He has freshly conditioned leather shoes and yellow braid on his shoulders with flecks of someone else's blood and you briefly, ludicrously seethe with jealousy. You are not special. You are not the only person he has brutalized today. You may not be the last.

It may all be a sham to terrorize you. You don't know how long you've been here.

And you are terrorized, locked in this shape of Tony Stark, cut off bodily from your code, the thing that makes you infinite, the thing that makes you better and unafraid.

You are Steve's first, best victim. You are familiar with all his tells, all the mannerisms that belong to Steve and not to Captain America: the way he smiles when he is gleeful, how he carries himself on those rare occasions he is not weighed down by the world. The timbre of his laugh, the shape of his easy pleasure.

And that's how you know: you are his singular delight.

Your dismantlement buoys him, somehow. The rending of skin that is only barely your own, the expert removal of nails you can mostly only mourn conceptually. Once he threatens a tooth but you don't think he would do that, no, you don't think so. Not even when he is standing over you with his hand half in your mouth and something vicious in his eyes that says he could cram his entire fist in there and you would stay wide-doe-eyed and passive and desperate and pathetic in the trap of your own hope.

You know you will let him keep taking. Whittling. Carving and slicing. Until all of you is parceled out for him to savor for months, years, life.

 

***

 

Steve is breaking your ribs because he is testing a theory. Tony would have recognized this behavior in himself. A mirror. Steve only has to bare your chest and put his hands around you because you are so scant, another manifestation of Tony Stark's out-of-control self-loathing -- and press slowly, slowly -- until the pain arcs and you are screaming again.

Don't, you say. You are thinking of the street, of Steve's fist in your mouth, of all the times he has pinned you to the mat, of all the times he has come inches away from snuffing your life out for real, for good. You tell Steve so. _Haven't you hurt me enough?_

Steve smiles, a herald of disaster. You have said something right and it will be worse for you and all you can think of is what Tony Stark didn't put in you, the thing that would make you say the right sequence of words. The thing that would fix this. The thing that would make Steve Rogers love you back.

You want to say: _wait, I am so new, I have been living in a cage and I have never even felt the sun on my face or seen the warmth Tony Stark remembered in your smile or experienced your body with anything other than violence._

 _Don't_ , Steve parrots, mock-incredulous, and he presses a knife against your new skin. I think I could love you, he confesses. He leans in to kiss your neck. It's like I'm meeting you all over again, he says. You're so light. So much freer.

You close your eyes and you bury what you remember of Steve, the real Steve.

 

***

 

Steve puts you in a box and all you can think of is all the boxes he's saved you -- no, Tony - from, over the years: a cell here, a cage there, a bottle-shaped box. You lose everything when the lights go. He is using a power tool because he thinks in doing so he has laid yet another barb for his Tony, the one that is a slant-rhyme of you; that he is throwing their long and storied past in your face, but you listen to the bolts go in and think of the slick wrap of armor and the way it felt just before the lights came on. And you wait. You wait and you recite the things you know of yourself: you are an engineer, you are Iron Man, once upon a time some version of you was Iron Man, ages ago there was a version of Steve that loved you, you are a hero, you are a traitor, you were a drunk and some qualities are just fixed, you think, and the terror is germinating in you now, some things are fixed, some heroes just die like this, alone, with no one to witness it, some of you just get erased, sometimes you don't come home, and god, you are hideously envious of the version of you that gets to be dead in that pod and the lights never come and so you are alone with yourself and your thoughts drum drum drum and Steve presses his lips right up to the box and whispers:

_This is your coffin, Tony._

 

***

 

You have always had Tony's distractions and Tony's failings and Tony's neuroses and your guiding star has always been his deep, abiding love for Steve Rogers.

Here, the dark brings down all those walls that Tony has carefully bricked and mortared over the years. You drive yourself to the edge and back and round again. You are dying on the wrong end of Steve's shield. You are carrying Steve's unconscious body out of Wakanda. You are dying in the snow. Your father is trying to break a bottle over your head.

Arrogant. Delusional. Arrogant. You built this war. You birthed it into existence by sheer force of will. A man has to want to be helped. Let me know when you do. Arrogant. A man has to want to be helped. A man has to want to be helped. A man has to want to be helped.

 

***

 

How was it, being dead, Steve says.

You're so shaky you can't get a grip on the wall to hold yourself up. Steve slings his arm around your bare waist, like a brother-lover-friend, brushes his lips against your filthy hair on his way to whisper in your ear. I know you hate the dark, he says, barbiturate-smooth, and then he opens the door and kicks you into a room with bodies of people you used to know.

The bodies have been laid in a row. Nat's neck is bent the wrong way. Wanda's face is pale and ashen, her dark skin gone grey. Thor is on his stomach with Jarnbjorn still lodged in his back.

Lie down, Steve says. You've been practicing.

You despise Tony Stark. You despise the job he has done on you, the way he has programmed despair for these people you have never known beyond conferred memories, how a feeling you don't understand can saturate you so. You can smell where your urine has run onto the freezing metal, the steam of it in the freezing room and you cry because you don't deserve to touch them, because you are playing the game where they wouldn't, because you know you're going to keep playing when you should just stand up and die instead. You are still crying. You have memories of crying, of Tony Stark sobbing himself to sleep alone, a hundred, a thousand times -- but you have never cried the way you cry now. You do your best approximation of supplication - Tony wasn't good at it and neither are you -- and Steve holds your body up and you clutch his biceps and his armband made of golden silk and you beg, beg, beg, please no more, please, please, please.

Supreme Leader kicks your legs out from under you. You go down hard and you do not look at the body under the sweep of red silk you've landed on.

You make a decision. You silence yourself and lie down right there in the space between Wanda and Nat.

You hold Wanda's cold hand and you press your face into Nat's side and her blood smells rotting and sticky-sweet and you remember the first time you kissed her and you have loved every person in this room in one way or another and Steve has his hand on his holster and -- 

You're freezing and the floor is bare metal where it's not skin and dirt and blood and all of these people have been dispatched quickly, no brutality spared, nothing to indicate there was ever even the promise of mercy and Steve pulls out his gun and fires until his magazine runs out and --

He fires. One, two, three, and you are sure this is the end, this is it, that you are being discarded because you are not Tony and so you are not enough. I know, you whisper to yourself. I know, I know I know.

What did we learn, Steve says, when his magazine is empty and there is a ring of holes around your body in a halo.

 _I'm not alive_ , you choke, and the monster smiles.

 

***

 

He bathes you in the sense that he chains you to a wall and sprays you with a firehose and still, you grit your teeth. You sob. You beg because you're weak and it feels like needles on your skin and he leaves it on your ribs long enough to undo all the healing -- do you heal? Long enough to hobble you so you must take big heaving breaths when you walk and hold yourself stiff and he gets an excuse to lay hands on you. He shampoos your hair. He takes you into his personal quarters and throws a freshly laundered white towel around your shoulders and tells you to stay still, darling, and he takes his straight razor and spackles your face with cream and runs the blade over you and sighs in that pleased way of his.

He stands you in front of his mirror, because he's vain now and maybe he's always been vain and maybe everything you thought you knew was wrong, maybe this isn't a parallel reality, maybe it's yours and it's one of the broken ones that other, whole people visit once in a while, maybe you're just stuck with this now-

Shh, Steve whispers.

The first time you've ever worn real clothes and the first time someone will take them from your body.

You look good in these colors, he says, and you let him move your limbs like a doll and he puts you in grey-green wool and a green sash and a yellow armband and he even moves your hand into a Nazi salute. That's where you fight him. You pull your arm down and he dislocates your shoulder and puts it back up anyway and steps behind you, his front pressed to your back, tears streaming down your face, rests his chin on your shoulder and points you to the mirror and forces you to confront the ugliness you won't let him kill, the part of you that's still playing the game, the complacent fool who still wants to believe that love can win the day.

It's just a new paint job, he soothes, and he presses his hand over your crotch and palpates what he finds there and your undamaged arm stays, limp, at your side.

 

***

 

You think you have come to terms with the fact that no one is ever going to love you. You learned it years ago; learned that the adoration of strangers was a cheap substitution, that accolades and cameras and money could sustain but never satisfy. You think you are done learning this lesson.

You are wrong. Supreme Leader takes you out of your cell and presses you down onto his bed and says we might as well make the most of this, don't you think, Tony, and when he strokes your cheek it is the final nail for the both of you.

Your hope has always been difficult to kill. People have thrown it in your face over the years -- for all your business acumen you have always been garbage at the business of people. They devour you. They've eaten you and spat up your bones, one lover after another, and still, you have tried to kindle hope in you, a fire that has been slowly eating you alive, and you

And then. And then Steve Rogers, Supreme Leader lays you down and straddles you and strokes your cheek and says _I'm never going to waste you again_  and you are less than even a strange, warm body and you cry because you let go of that small flame and you feed your body to it and you are gone.

 

***

 

You have both gotten your tastes, and the Supreme Leader is amused by his ability to conjure you into flesh at will. It happens again. It happens with you fighting, and then it happens with Steve's sidearm pressed against your tongue just so he can savor your terror a moment longer, just so the room can hang with wretched stillness for a moment before he gets inside you.

You have an entire life that isn't your own to sustain you. There are very few memories not touched by trauma or fear or self-loathing, but the few that remain include Steve's face. It is easy to substitute. It is less easy after, when the Supreme Leader blows on your skin and runs his hands over your ribs and looks at your face like he is memorizing a map. There is hair curling out of your pores, sweat gathering in the dip of your collarbone, Steve's favorite place to taste, in the well of your thighs, his favorite place to cut.

Once, he kisses you on the lips, and this is the single torment that tips the scales.

You cry. You think you will never be able to stop, that the hopelessness of it is already burying you alive. You are beneath him and you cannot free your hands to hide your face so you let your gaze drift and allow his hands on your heaving chest and on your face and all over your mayfly body.

Supreme Leader wipes your cheek with his thumb. He leans in, kisses you again.

You're so much more than he could ever be, he says. You're so raw. All those memories and you still haven't learned guile.

If you ever loved me, you say, and you are raw with the shame of it. If you loved any version of me, _please_.

Supreme Leader loves that. I did love you, he says, and it is tender and the sun falls on his skin and for a moment it is almost possible to believe that he is the real version that Tony Stark loved and followed and worshipped.

But owning you is better, he whispers.

**Author's Note:**

> • Thank you for reading!  
> • I hope you suffered some.  
> • I treasure any and all comments.  
> • This story has a [rebloggable post.](https://kiyaar.tumblr.com/post/184861695488/fic-your-favorite-consciousness) If you enjoyed it, please consider reblogging!  
> • I am kiyaar on [tumblr](http://kiyaar.tumblr.com) and besafesteve on [twitter](http://twitter.com/besafesteve).


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